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Wow. this is such a very interesting and informative discussion! I believe social networking and social media sites is really helpful in bringing good amount of traffic for our sites and also serves as a marketing too as well.

I'm with you here. I hate Social Networking sites except Linkedin, and don't see the value in Twitter, Facebook, and forget Myspace. Linkedin seems to be the only one that I have seen drive quality traffic to my site.

I simply like some of them particularly del.icio.us, digg, squidoo, linkedin, facebook, technorati and so on. I visit them regularly and see a lot of difference in terms of traffic.
As a matter of fact, I got some business too from my linkedin profile.

But some of these sites such as facebook, delicious are hard to understand. Need to spend a whole day to understand a bit. Who has all days for one site.

I enjoyed the articles contributed by all. Thank you all for taking your time to participate and share your experience.

Social Network is the focus of building relationships, adding value to your self growth, and lifestyles. Giving you resources to apply these different topics into your own life, giving it social value.

Social networking has evolved as a big tool now.One must understand that such types of tools are verastile in nature and this is why they are being used for multiple purposes including marketing and SEO.There is nothing is wrong as long anything goes unethical.

Social networking isn't about "herding" anyone or linking up with strangers. It's about finding those that have interests like yours and building positive relationships with them. Although you can build a somewhat personal relationship with your network contacts, for me Social Networking is another way to promote my business and build good business relationships with clients and prospective clients.

I agree with your description. You can look at the dark side of social media (people who try to take advantage of others) or the light side (connecting with others for valid reasons).

How you look at it will determine how useful you find it to be, based on your needs and your values.

In my opinion, a contact is a contact. It may give someone a better impression of you, or it may lead to a sale. You can't control the outcome, but you can create the opportunity.

I think it all depends on what site you're trying to market. Some sites are just so much more easy to network about because people have an interest. If you have just a straight up ecommerce site about auto parts, or home mortgage refinance site, your options are pretty limited.